It is easy to think of the concept of oligarchy as something distant and fantastical – something that involves exotic destinations like Manhattan, Monaco, Macau and Moscow but not the Middle America locales that you’d never see in, say, a glitzy Jason Bourne flick. I guess the assumption at work is that in a place so often derided as Flyover Country, there’s not much that any true oligarch might covet.

Of course, there’s a good case to be made that oligarchy is actually more of a powerful social, political and cultural force out here than anywhere else. From yesteryear’s Copper Kings in Montana to today’s epic land and water grab all over the Midwest and Rocky Mountain region, the heartland has always been the oligarchs’ playground. It is also their laboratory – the place where the ruling class brutally imposes its hare-brained schemes on the population, as if we are guinea pigs.

You can see what this local version of oligarchy looks like most clearly in education. Indeed, in the last few days, the national media momentarily reported on such oligarchy when the GOP’s prospective 2016 presidential candidate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, publicly berated teachers with the ugly “you people” epithet. The headline-grabbing exchange came after an educator dared to question him about his efforts to turn his state into a laboratory for the destructive ideology of anti-public-school oligarchs. Christie, who has slashed public school funding and worked to divert public education resources into private schools, responded to the question with the oligarch’s let-them-eat-cake attitude, saying of teachers “I’m tired of you people.”

But, then, as shocking as this let-them-eat-cake attitude may seem when it is evinced so brazenly by a national politician, it is the same oligarchic attitude that now dominates local education politics all over the country. Perhaps most illustrative of the trend is my home state of Colorado. This state has unfortunately become the national petri dish of the Education Oligarchs – people like the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft; Michael Bloomberg, the anti-union media mogul; and Philip Anschutz, the billionaire sponsor of right-wing Christian causes. These oligarchs and others aim to put everything – including our kids future – up for sale to the highest bidder in the Colorado education system.

One way to see this is to look at how the Walton family and Gates have deployed their wealth to make an opportunity out of this square state’s infamous education finance problems. Leveraging their tax-subsidized foundations, they purport to come to the financial rescue of budget-strapped schools. Yet, they typically tie their seemingly altruistic beneficence to ideological demands.

For example, some foundations make their cash contingent on schools tearing up teachers’ union contracts and putting more unproven technology into the classroom.

Some go further and push specific technologies into classrooms – technologies that, not coincidentally, their corporations stand to profit from. One example: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has used $100 million from his foundation to ram his company’s corporate partner, inBloom, into the Colorado’s largest school district. InBloom collects student data to share with technology companies like Gates’ Microsoft, which then develop for-profit education software to sell back to schools. According to the New York Times, parents objecting to the surveillance-like technology feared “officials might be unable to evaluate inBloom objectively, given its backing by the Gates Foundation, a major donor to public schools whose grant money Jeffco was hoping to attract.” The school district ultimately received a coveted $5.2 million grant from the Gates foundation and – not surprisingly – decided to keep using inBloom.

Most recently, some of these billionaires make headlines financing Colorado ballot initiatives that seem altruistic in their ostensible goals of raising revenue for schools. Yet, the oligarchs make sure that the details of those initiatives quietly steer a massive chunk of the new education revenue away from public schools and into the coffers of privately administered charter schools – the ones that on the whole don’t provide better educational outcomes, but do serve those billionaires’ desires to undermine teachers’ unions.

Still another way to see what the local effects of oligarchy look like on a day-to-day basis is to behold the hideous school board politics of my hometown of Denver, where data show years of anti-public-school “reforms” have seriously harmed children. I first learned about this depressing situation a few years ago when my wife ran as a pro-public-school candidate for an unpaid school board position and suddenly faced a $200,000+ campaign against her, including an election-timed appearance from George W. Bush to rally the school privatization movement. It is a hard-to-believe situation – but it is, alas, very real.

As I have previously reported, five years ago, the school system here was turned into a Wall Street profit center and prospective campaign contribution engine by then-school superintendent Michael Bennet. Bennet had zero experience in education policy when he came into the job, but he did have vast business connections from his tenure as a corporate raider for Anschutz, the right-wing billionaire. He put that to work when in 2008 he orchestrated a pension financing deal that made Wall Street banks so much money and cost the school system so much cash it became a national cautionary tale on the front page of the New York Times. Bennet, though, was long gone by the time the destruction was evident. Within a year of the original deal, he was on his way to getting handsomely repaid for his work, with the financial industry that his scheme enriched conveniently serving as one of his top U.S. Senate campaign contributors.

The school budget crisis this scheme exacerbated has empowered billionaires’ foundations to leverage their wealth in the name of corporatist ideology. With Denver schools especially strapped for cash in the wake of Bennet’s scheme, the Waltons, the Gateses and others have in the Denver Public School system a perfect target. The schools’ budget crisis makes local schools particularly willing to trade education policymaking – say, tearing up a school’s union contract – for the much-needed operating cash that foundations provide. Under the rule of this oligarchy, Denver has for years now been on a pro-charter-school, anti-union tear. Despite data showing that such ideology has often produced terrible academic results in Denver, the corporate “reforms” have nonetheless been loyally backed by the city’s corruption-plagued school board. Even by modern standards, that oligarchy-serving corruption is breathtaking, as Denver school board members moonlight in jobs that give them personal financial interests in anti-public-school “reforms.” As I recently reported:

(The school board’s) current president is paid by a private education foundation whose stated goal is to put more public money into privately run charter schools. It’s immediate past president resigned to go work for a private education foundation that does business with the school district. Another of its board members runs a foundation that gets money from the school district. A previous board member went from the board to a run a group looking to bring more corporate influence into the school system. And now another leading candidate for a board vacancy, the pro-voucher former lieutenant governor Barbara O’Brien, says that even if she wins the board seat, she will ignore concerns about self-dealing and remain the paid executive director of a pro-charter foundation to which the school board gives public money.

All of this has created a political climate where corruption and conflicts of interest are just right out in the open. In this local oligarchy, nobody even tries to hide what’s really going on. There simply is no shame anymore – nor is there any pretense surrounding what education politics is now really all about. To see that in action, consider this year’s school board candidate Michael Johnson.

Like O’Brien and the other slate of anti-public-school candidates, Johnson is campaigning on a promise to take more money out of the public school system and put it into privately run charter schools. But what distinguishes him is his role making huge money off the public school system for his private law firm, Kutak Rock. He did this as one of the key participating private attorneys in the aforementioned Wall Street financing scheme that pulverized the school system’s budget.

According to financial documents obtained by Salon that Bennet allies in the school system have until now kept secret, Denver taxpayers have been forced to cough up more than $3.6 million million to Johnson’s private law firm for bond work in the last decade. One fifth of that sum was generated since just 2008 – specifically for the budget-busting refinancing deal that made Wall Street so much cash. Johnson was one of the Kutak Rock attorneys who worked on that deal. Yes, that’s right – a key player at the law firm that made so much money off the infamous refinancing deal and that has made millions off school board business is running for a decision-making position on the school board.

The potential for self-dealing and conflicts of interest should be obvious if Johnson is elected to a school board that has done so much business with his law firm (no doubt, this is why Kutak Rock employees are scattered throughout his campaign reports – though thanks to Colorado’s pathetic campaign finance disclosure laws, we won’t know if there was more such money financing the outside groups supporting him).

Incredibly, to help him navigate the legal questions surrounding those potential conflicts of interest, Johnson’s campaign was by his own admission provided legal counsel at taxpayer expense by the Denver school administration. This is grotesque, but not all that surprising. After all, this is the same administration that has been a champion of Johnson’s pro-charter-school platform. It is also the same administration that is so cavalier with taxpayer cash that it is now diverting a huge chunk of resources out of Denver classrooms and into the renovation of a lavish new downtown headquarters for school administration officials.

In a minimally functioning democracy, these facts would doom a candidate in a local school board election. But this isn’t a functioning democracy – this is an oligarchy. And so these facts have been drowned out by the anti-public-school slate’s huge money advantage – an advantage which allows these “reform” candidates to overwhelm voters with mail and paid canvassing, all while the underfunded opposition doesn’t have matching resources to get inconvenient facts out.

That money advantage, of course, comes from – you guessed it! – the oligarchs. For instance, as Westword reports, Johnson and O’Brien have cashed huge checks from right-wing billionaire Phil Anschutz, who is famous in Colorado for funding anti-gay ballot initiatives and sponsoring conservative Christian political groups like Colorado for Family Values.

They have also cashed similarly large checks from oilman and former Colorado Republican Party chairman Bruce Benson. And they have received huge donations from Kent Thiry and/or Thiry’s wife. Thiry is the CEO of a scandal-plagued health care conglomerate that has made a name for itself as a target of federal criminal and civil investigations.

Thanks to this, the oligarchy-backed slate in this one city is now awash in an unprecedented amount of money that allows the slate to grossly outspend the pro-public education forces. According to the latest campaign finance reports, the slate of four anti-public-school candidates in Denver has collectively raked in almost $600,000. That figure doesn’t even counting the hundreds of thousands of dollars more in “independent expenditures” almost certainly being spent on their behalf by out-of-state education “reform” groups. One of those we already know about is called “Great Schools Denver”. Its name implies it is a local group, but its $200,000+ slush fund is provided by just 9 Education Oligarchs, the majority of whom aren’t from Denver. Indeed, a third of its money is provided by Bloomberg, and another third is provided by an arm of a D.C.-based front group sponsored by Wall Streeters.

One reaction to all this is to be thankful that we here in Colorado at least still have elections for school boards. After all, in more and more locales, the oligarchs have used their money to buy an end to such elections and vest all school decisions with the mayor. That makes schools easier for those oligarchs to control, because they only have to buy and sell one big political office rather than many small ones that still face some semblance of grassroots accountability.

But while we can be thankful that the patina of democracy still exists here, it is just that: a patina. With the amount of cash oligarchs are pouring into the education politics of this state and with the revolving door spinning so fast between school boards and the corporate oligarchy those boards do business, the elections often turn out to be predetermined affairs. One side has all the cash and thus overwhelms – and confuses – voters with reams of glossy mailers. The other side has earnest folk who knock on thousands of doors – but can rarely break through the noise.

That, of course, is by design. Democracy becomes oligarchy when enough cash is marshaled to effectively cut off a debate. This is especially true in the increasing number of places like Colorado where an ideological Citizen Kane-like monopolist makes sure there’s as little objective coverage of education as possible.

The only hope is that enough voters become aware of what’s going on – and actually do something about it. But that first requires a general awakening – which is exactly what the oligarchs are trying most desperately to prevent.

Max M. Haiflich, Jr.Free = no regulations = survival of the fittest = SomaliaSo in summation, the Conservative Republican’s Political Platform is, LIES, MORE LIES, OUTRAGIOUS LIES, and DAMN STUPID LIES, because we represent the word of GOD.

New proof that vouchers and charter schools don't reform education, just subject it to the whims of businessmen

Just 10 days into a new academic year, classes were abruptly over at one North Carolina charter school this year.

In September, parents who had enrolled their children in Kinston Charter Academy received a letter from the principal directing them to take their children someplace else.

According to a local news report, a mere two days prior to those letters being received, the local board met in an emergency session to close the school after “low performance and disciplinary challenges made the enrollment numbers dwindle.”

Said one dismayed parent, “I feel like we should have got more notice. If they was going to close the school, they should’ve gone ahead and let us know that before we enrolled the kids.”

Meanwhile, folks at the North Carolina Justice Center are wondering what the school did with the $666,818 in state education funding it received in July that was supposed to last through October. The school had actually been overfunded for 366 students, but only 230 students enrolled.

Hundreds of miles away in Philadelphia, parents received a similar notice, this time not by a letter from the principal but from a notice on a website. Due to “safety concerns and financial instability,” Solomon Charter School was abruptly closed to its 330 students.

The school, a cyber charter that was supposed to deliver instruction over the Internet, also demanded parents return computer equipment to the school.

“I was just trying to get him a good education,” said one parent, “and now I don’t know where he will go.”

“No type of warning,” said another. “We bring our kids to school Monday; they say the school is shut down… it’s closing for good, so what are we to do?”

In the meantime, according to news reports, state officials are wondering why a school that was required by law to hold classes online was holding classes in an unsafe building instead – oh, and in a building that happened to also house a clinic for sexual and pornography offenders.

“Another charter school has closed,” began a recent article in a Florida paper, leaving 60 students in the lurch – only this time without bothering to tell district officials beforehand.

In Ohio, at least 15 charter schools have abruptly closed this year – most don’t even bother to list a reason.

In Detroit, a city wracked by debt and bankruptcy, officials scrambled to close a failed charter school by Oct. 31 this year, due to the school’s debts, which exceeded $400,000.

According to The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., spent over $1 million on closing failed charter schools from 2008-2012.

More cities are following the lead of districts like Chicago, where the largest shutdown of public schools in the nation’s history occurred at the very same time that new private charter schools were being expanded by the district.

Abruptly opening and closing schools – leaving school children, parents and communities in the lurch and taxpayers holding the bag – is not a matter of happenstance. It’s by design.

The design in mind, of course, is being called a “market.” Parents and taxpayers who used to rely on having public schools as anchor institutions in their communities – much like they rely on fire and police stations, parks and rec centers, and the town hall – are being told that the education of children is now subject to the whims of “the market.”

The supposed benefit to all this is that parents get a “choice” about where they send their children to school. But while parents are pushed to pick their schools on the increasingly turbulent bazaar of “choice,” the game resembles much less a level playing field and much more a game of chance in which the house rules determine the odds. And too many of the nation’s families – and their communities – are getting caught up in a crapshoot with our children’s education at stake.

Whether from charters or voucher-funded private schools, the explosive growth of crapshoot schools is fast becoming the norm. And too few are asking, “At what risks?”

Welcome to the charter churn

For years, public schools have been admonished to run their operations “more like a business.”

Politicians on the right and left have criticized pubic education for being a “monopoly” that is not subjected to enough “competition” in the “market.”

It is primarily this business thinking that is behind the push for public education to provide more “choice.” So now superintendents are calling themselves CEOs, and parents are being called customers.

But the questions no one ever seems to ask are, “What kind of business? And don’t most businesses fail?”

Nevertheless, the “business drivers” in education have rolled out, and essential to this line of thinking is that charter schools provide the necessary competition the public school monopoly has lacked, and the “churn” of children in the system will determine which schools stay open and which ones close.

Since when did children become “churn?”

Businesses that operate on a subscriber model, such as telephone companies and credit card providers, are deeply knowledgeable about the rate at which their customers flow into and out of their billing systems. By knowing the “churn rate” these businesses can manipulate the “lifetime value” of customers by knowing when to goose the system with incentives or extract higher revenues when demand is running high.

This faith in churn rate is behind the movement for expanding charter schools. Writing at his blog at the education trade newspaper Education Week, teacher and edu-blogger Anthony Cody recently observed, “Charter supporters are now advocating that charter schools that are not producing results must be closed with the same ruthlessness as traditional public schools … This is how markets function … We don’t need to wait long to find out if schools are ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ These judgments should be made fast, and acted upon immediately.”

Leading charter school advocates tell us, in fact, that closing charters down and interrupting more children’s education is a really good thing.

According to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, the overall closure rate of charters has ballooned by over 255 percent. This is “a positive trend,” said that association’s president and CEO.

Little regard seems to be given to the data that charter schools have proven to be not particularly any better than traditional public schools. The most recent comparison of charter school performance to traditional public schools nationwide found that more charter schools are doing better than they were previously. But a careful analysis of the study showed only “a tiny real impact on the part of charter schools.”

And the only real way to improve the overall quality of charter schools seems to be to close more of them down. How is this good for children attending those schools?

“This whole strategy of school reform is having devastating results,” Cody concluded. “Neighborhood schools, especially those in African American and Latino communities, are being closed rapidly and without recourse.” Even “worthwhile charter schools such as ACE Leadership High School in Albuquerque, which actively recruits drop-outs and struggling students, are likely to fall under the club, because they may not produce the rapid test score gains this burn and churn reform strategy demands.”

And increasingly the result is parents taking a chance in a craps game not altogether of their choosing.

Vouchers: A ticket to take a chance

If families aren’t being subjected to churn from competitive charters on the one side, they are increasingly being lured with voucher money on the other.

Giving parents vouchers and telling them to shop for a school on the private market, often risking taxpayer money and their children’s future, is another rapidly growing trend in the new “education market.”

Writing at Americans United, Simon Brown explained, “More states than ever are piling onto the ‘school choice’ bandwagon. In 2013 alone, 15 states either expanded or created voucher or ‘neo-voucher’ programs – a system of generous tax credits that are vouchers by another name.”

Again, much like the charter crapshoot, parents are told to take their chances in an open market rather than rely on local schools and trained professional teachers in a regulated program of learning.

One such state to take up this game of chance is North Carolina. Writing for NC Policy Watch, Lindsay Wagner recently reported, “For the first time in its history, North Carolina will allow taxpayer funds to go to largely unaccountable private schools, 70 percent of which are religious institutions.”

What’s not required of these private schools would set off alarm bells in most parents’ minds: “Criminal background checks, any kind of curricular goals or guidelines, credentialed and/or licensed teaching staff, and a requirement to reflect the racial and ethnic demographics of the district in the student.”

A lone state regulator is responsible for conducting site visits to all 698 of these private schools. “I try to get out to all of them once every three years,” he told Wagner, which amounts to roughly 233 school visits each year across the state.

Further, these private schools, which are receiving taxpayer money and the faith of parents who want to do what’s best for their children, are not subject to the same standards that public schools have for testing students’ academic achievement and making that data publicly available.

Instead of the raft of tests N.C. public schools are subjected to, private schools receiving school vouchers need only to “administer a nationally-recognized standardized test” that can be “any exam,” so long as the score can be compared to children in taking the same test in any other state.

Wagner looked closely at some of these schools. One, New City Christian School in Asheville, touted its ability to close the “achievement gap” between white and African-American students but provided parents with no “truly comparable” way to compare New City’s performance to local schools.

Another school, Bethel Christian Academy in Kinston, “provides its students with an educational program that in its entirety, exalts and glorifies the Lord Jesus Christ by making Him the center of all things.”

The school uses textbooks that are “God-centered,” and Wagner observed, “teach students Bible-based facts, including the following: dinosaurs and humans co-existed on Earth; slave-masters generally treated their slaves well; in some areas, the KKK fought the decline in morality by using the sign of the cross; and gay people have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists.”

“If you are a gay student or interested in listening to or creating secular music,” noted Wagner, “that’s grounds for expulsion.”

How are parents, with children to educate, and citizens, who want to direct tax money toward the best interests of children, supposed to judge the “value” of these schools?

When Wagner approached public officials with the question, “Where’s the accountability?” here is what she heard:

Rep. Marcus Brandon, a proponent of vouchers, told NC Policy Watch, “parents know what’s best for their children. If it’s a good school, parents will go there. And if it’s bad, parents won’t … The schools already have the accountability you could demand of a school because they work in the free enterprise system. If they don’t pride the product that meets the needs of the parents, those parents will vote with their feet … I had 38 schools close this year because they didn’t have the financial adequance to continue,” he added.

Where did the students go? “They dispersed and went to other schools. We don’t keep those records,” a North Carolina schools official said.

In other words, entrusting education to a voucher-driven market is mostly “a guessing game,” Wagner concluded – a “guessing game” perhaps for taxpayers, whose main risks are bad policy and wasted resources – but a whole lot worse for the parents and students involved whose failed gamble on a crapshoot school can cost an entire year of learning or more.

Shouldn’t a responsible society do something to prevent that?

The national pursuit to gamble with our children’s future

North Carolina is hardly alone in this roll out of crapshoot voucher schools.

In Oklahoma, for instance, that state’s new school voucher program spends $1.6 million in state funds to send special needs students to private schools. However, only six of the 49 private schools currently accepting voucher money – 43 of which, by the way, are religious schools – “specifically cater to students with special needs.”

Even traditional public schools are increasingly at risk to a crapshoot game of being opened and closed regardless of the effects on students.

In New York City, as Juan Gonzales recently reported in The Daily News, “the mayor’s relentless rush to shutter neighborhood schools” seems to be the chosen remedy for somehow improving them.

To local administrators, “shutting down a school and reopening it under new management is just good business practice. But to parents, teachers and students, our local schools are the anchors to our neighborhoods. They are part of the fabric of community life. The local art or gym teacher is known by and appreciated by everyone.”

Indeed, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has done much to contribute to the spread of crapshoot schools. The very schools he was instrumental in creating when he ran the system in Chicago are now some of the schools being shut down, a local Chicago news source recently informed.

This incoherence coming from the nation’s leadership leaves parents with the feeling they are “part of one big experiment,” the reporter of that story noted.

“Sometimes I think that we are all pieces in the game that they’re playing,” another parent said. “And the game doesn’t affect their lives. It affects our lives. It affects our children’s lives and the outcomes of their lives.”

Echoing this sentiment, Noah Berlatsky, writing at The Atlantic, explained, “Closings are only the latest example of a pattern of ‘reform’ and churn, in which neighborhoods without the resources or political clout to defend themselves are reorganized and experimented on.”

The alternative to crapshoot schools

Another way of running schools, as Gonzales noted, is that you don’t close the school down when it has problems. “If a school is underperforming, you add an after-school program. If there are many English-language learners, you increase language instruction.”

Are we certain that approach doesn’t work?

In the blog post from Anthony Cody, he noted, schools often do better by “building a supportive collaborative community” that creates “the conditions we need in order to grow as teachers, and improve outcomes for students.”

Cody cited programs such as the Priority Schools Campaign from the National Education Association, Reconnecting McDowell from the American Federation of Teachers, efforts by the California Teachers Association to lower class size and provide time for teacher collaboration through the Quality Education Investment Act, and the results of Chicago’s democratically controlled neighborhood schools, which do better than the administration’s “turnarounds that have received millions of extra dollars.”

Parents are constantly being told of the need for stability in their children’s lives. Are we now somehow to believe that their educational lives don’t need that stability too? Rather than being a solution for anything, the proliferation of crapshoot schools and the mindset that drives them are becoming yet another very big problem, and one our children and our communities would all be a lot better off without.

Max M. Haiflich, Jr.Free = no regulations = survival of the fittest = SomaliaSo in summation, the Conservative Republican’s Political Platform is, LIES, MORE LIES, OUTRAGIOUS LIES, and DAMN STUPID LIES, because we represent the word of GOD.

In Bridgeport, a quiet bipartisan scheme to protect ed reformers' favorite school chief is suspected by critics

Education reform lightning rod Paul Vallas – who courted controversy helming school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago — isn’t on the ballot tomorrow. But a school board election in Bridgeport, Conn. – the latest district to tap Vallas to oversee reforms — could effectively spell his fate. Tomorrow’s vote will offer the latest referendum on the bipartisan, billionaire-backed mainstream education reform movement, and on a multi-year effort by local Democrats – aided by the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee — to defeat or disempower labor-backed dissenters.

“As I’ve gone around the country, I always point to Bridgeport as one of the signs that the people can beat the power,” former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and high-profile reform critic Diane Ravitch told activists on a conference call last month. Tuesday’s election is the latest round in a long-running war over ed reform, and who should shape it, in the largest city in one of the country’s most unequal states.

For the sake of shielding Vallas and his agenda, activists allege that the city’s Democratic machine has acted indifferent or even hostile to defeating Republicans tomorrow.

“What’s at stake is the future direction of Bridgeport schools,” said Connecticut Working Families Party executive director Lindsay Farrell, citing issues including testing and class size. “And I think, in a broader sense, the direction of public education in this country.”

As I’ve reported, Bridgeport’s school board became a battleground in 2009, when two of its Republican members were ousted in an election by candidates from the labor-backed Working Families Party. While Bridgeport is overwhelmingly Democratic, by law no more than two-thirds of its nine school board seats can be held by the same party. While the board’s Democrats and Republicans had often seen eye to eye on education, the WFP didn’t. “They were very effective at questioning the status quo,” Bridgeport Education Association vice president Rob Traber told Salon last year, and when Mayor Bill Finch’s superintendent pushed unpopular cuts in 2011, the Democratic machine and its business allies got “afraid that they might lose control of the board.”

Tensions rose. Majorities on the school board and state board of ed voted (with Mayor Finch and Gov. Dan Malloy’s backing) to replace the elected board with state appointees. A court overturned them and ordered the elected board restored. Finch then pushed a referendum in 2012 to end school board elections – with cash from Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee and an appearance by Rhee’s husband, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson – but was rebuffed by voters 2-to-1. Fitch’s director of education and youth told Salon afterward that ending school board elections had been touted by “top reformers” because “taking the politics out” had proven “a catalyst” for reform elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the board’s majority tapped Vallas as schools chief (first temporary, then permanent), and an activist retired judge sued on the grounds that Vallas lacked the legally required credentials for the position. That suit is pending.

But Vallas’ greatest threat comes at the ballot box tomorrow: In hopes of expanding their defiant faction to a majority, critics of the Rhee-Bloomberg-Vallas approach ran in the September Democratic Primary and, in an upset, beat the mayor’s favored candidates. On Tuesday, they’ll face off against Republican candidates in an election likely to leave the anti-Vallas, WFP-friendly faction with between four and six of the board’s nine votes. Assuming Vallas survives the lawsuit, whichever side holds a majority on the board will be positioned to determine his fate.

Defending his record, Vallas told the Atlantic’s Molly Ball in September, “We brought this district back from the brink without cutting a single teacher. If that’s controversy, it’s made-up controversy.”

“What we’ve seen since Paul Vallas became superintendent is much more of an emphasis on testing, and lots of cuts to services and programs that kind of make the school experience more comprehensive for students,” WFP’s Farrell countered last week. She cited students “being tested every six weeks.” Farrell told Salon that “If the team of five Democrats and Working Families Party candidates win, those policies will be rolled back. But they’ll be continued probably if we see the Republicans win.” If they take control, Farrell said, WFP-backed progressives would shift resources “back into the classroom,” because “There are some classrooms right now in Bridgeport where there are 40 students and one teacher. Nobody’s learning in that classroom.”

So who’s Mayor Finch rooting for: the Democrats who won his party’s primary, or the Republicans less likely to spar with his schools chief? “I look forward to working with the eventual winners to continue the needed progress in our school system for the good of our children within the fiscal limitations that confront us,” the mayor said in an emailed statement. Finch urged the election’s winners to “pursue every resource available for our children including continuing the private-public partnerships which have been extremely beneficial …” Finch’s office did not respond to a follow-up inquiry Friday morning about whom he’ll be pulling the lever for.

The WFP notes a sharp contrast between the Democratic Party’s efforts on behalf of its pro-Vallas candidates in the primary, and its approach to tomorrow’s showdown with the GOP. “The Democratic Party put a lot of resources into the mayor’s slate in the primary, and a lot of money,” said Farrell. “We haven’t really seen them doing anything to help the challengers who won in the primary in the general election.” She told Salon that “education budgets are large chunks of money, and you know, we’ve been really stunned by the lengths to which Mayor Bill Finch, and the Democratic Chair Mario Testa, and Paul Vallas will go to maintain power over those budgets.”

Some Bridgeport progressives take their allegations another step. Retired Judge Carmen Lopez, the local activist who filed the lawsuit against Vallas, told Salon she believes the mayor and his allies were “working to make sure that the Republicans win” because “that’s the only way that Finch could get what he wants, which is for Vallas to stay in power.” Voter Jessica Allen told Salon that City Council president Thomas McCarthy visited her house and, when she asked about education, told her that while “under normal circumstances I would never tell anybody to vote Republican,” in this case “you should be voting for [GOP contender] Larcheveque.” Allen said McCarthy told her the mayor “tried to make these fantastic changes, but everything that we try to do keeps getting blocked …” (Allen, a registered independent, told Salon she thinks “the schools are really screwed up” and “I don’t know what the right answer is.”) But Council member McCarthy told Salon in an email that he was “encouraging my constituents to vote all of Row B, the Democratic line.”

Lopez noted that the final pre-election campaign finance filings show a $50 donation to Larcheveque from the husband of Democratic state Rep. Auden Grogins. The Connecticut Post reported that Bridgeport Party Chair Mario Testa told a Democratic nominating convention in July, “My main concern is not the Republican Party. It’s the Working Families Party.” Calls to Testa’s number listed on the state party website were not answered, and no voice mail was available.

Tuesday’s election comes as some of Michelle Rhee’s antagonists argue they’ve reached a turning point in a national education reform debate in which they’ve long been playing defense. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten told Salon last month that the lobby that supports “test-based accountability” and “creating choice at the expense of other public schools” has “dominated the first half” of the showdown, but “hasn’t proven their case, and in fact people are getting skeptical about it.” Weingarten, who has publicly supported union contract compromises that introduced “performance bonuses” or made it easier to fire teachers as well as the Chicago teachers’ strike and Seattle teachers’ test boycott, argued most parents “actually trust teachers and even their unions and principals and parent associations hugely more than they trust the CEOs, the business types, or the governors.”

Traber, who leads a local affiliated with the country’s largest union, the National Education Association, acknowledged last year that the referendum rout didn’t itself reflect overwhelming opposition to Vallas’ favored education policies. “We determined that if we allowed them to define the question on the basis of fixing the schools – even though we don’t think their solution is going to fix the schools – that they would win,” he told Salon. “But if we argued the case on the question of, ‘Under what circumstances does a citizen have the right to vote?’ we would win.” WFP’s Farrell said the Bridgeport fight showed “that when parents and families and educators and community activists get engaged and get organized on education issues, they push back pretty heavily against mechanisms to privatize the system or to make their schools governed in a less democratic way.”

Max M. Haiflich, Jr.Free = no regulations = survival of the fittest = SomaliaSo in summation, the Conservative Republican’s Political Platform is, LIES, MORE LIES, OUTRAGIOUS LIES, and DAMN STUPID LIES, because we represent the word of GOD.

It is easy to think of the concept of oligarchy as something distant and fantastical – something that involves exotic destinations like Manhattan, Monaco, Macau and Moscow but not the Middle America locales that you’d never see in, say, a glitzy Jason Bourne flick. I guess the assumption at work is that in a place so often derided as Flyover Country, there’s not much that any true oligarch might covet.

Of course, there’s a good case to be made that oligarchy is actually more of a powerful social, political and cultural force out here than anywhere else. From yesteryear’s Copper Kings in Montana to today’s epic land and water grab all over the Midwest and Rocky Mountain region, the heartland has always been the oligarchs’ playground. It is also their laboratory – the place where the ruling class brutally imposes its hare-brained schemes on the population, as if we are guinea pigs.

You can see what this local version of oligarchy looks like most clearly in education. Indeed, in the last few days, the national media momentarily reported on such oligarchy when the GOP’s prospective 2016 presidential candidate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, publicly berated teachers with the ugly “you people” epithet. The headline-grabbing exchange came after an educator dared to question him about his efforts to turn his state into a laboratory for the destructive ideology of anti-public-school oligarchs. Christie, who has slashed public school funding and worked to divert public education resources into private schools, responded to the question with the oligarch’s let-them-eat-cake attitude, saying of teachers “I’m tired of you people.”

But, then, as shocking as this let-them-eat-cake attitude may seem when it is evinced so brazenly by a national politician, it is the same oligarchic attitude that now dominates local education politics all over the country. Perhaps most illustrative of the trend is my home state of Colorado. This state has unfortunately become the national petri dish of the Education Oligarchs – people like the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft; Michael Bloomberg, the anti-union media mogul; and Philip Anschutz, the billionaire sponsor of right-wing Christian causes. These oligarchs and others aim to put everything – including our kids future – up for sale to the highest bidder in the Colorado education system.

One way to see this is to look at how the Walton family and Gates have deployed their wealth to make an opportunity out of this square state’s infamous education finance problems. Leveraging their tax-subsidized foundations, they purport to come to the financial rescue of budget-strapped schools. Yet, they typically tie their seemingly altruistic beneficence to ideological demands.

For example, some foundations make their cash contingent on schools tearing up teachers’ union contracts and putting more unproven technology into the classroom.

Some go further and push specific technologies into classrooms – technologies that, not coincidentally, their corporations stand to profit from. One example: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has used $100 million from his foundation to ram his company’s corporate partner, inBloom, into the Colorado’s largest school district. InBloom collects student data to share with technology companies like Gates’ Microsoft, which then develop for-profit education software to sell back to schools. According to the New York Times, parents objecting to the surveillance-like technology feared “officials might be unable to evaluate inBloom objectively, given its backing by the Gates Foundation, a major donor to public schools whose grant money Jeffco was hoping to attract.” The school district ultimately received a coveted $5.2 million grant from the Gates foundation and – not surprisingly – decided to keep using inBloom.

Most recently, some of these billionaires make headlines financing Colorado ballot initiatives that seem altruistic in their ostensible goals of raising revenue for schools. Yet, the oligarchs make sure that the details of those initiatives quietly steer a massive chunk of the new education revenue away from public schools and into the coffers of privately administered charter schools – the ones that on the whole don’t provide better educational outcomes, but do serve those billionaires’ desires to undermine teachers’ unions.

Still another way to see what the local effects of oligarchy look like on a day-to-day basis is to behold the hideous school board politics of my hometown of Denver, where data show years of anti-public-school “reforms” have seriously harmed children. I first learned about this depressing situation a few years ago when my wife ran as a pro-public-school candidate for an unpaid school board position and suddenly faced a $200,000+ campaign against her, including an election-timed appearance from George W. Bush to rally the school privatization movement. It is a hard-to-believe situation – but it is, alas, very real.

As I have previously reported, five years ago, the school system here was turned into a Wall Street profit center and prospective campaign contribution engine by then-school superintendent Michael Bennet. Bennet had zero experience in education policy when he came into the job, but he did have vast business connections from his tenure as a corporate raider for Anschutz, the right-wing billionaire. He put that to work when in 2008 he orchestrated a pension financing deal that made Wall Street banks so much money and cost the school system so much cash it became a national cautionary tale on the front page of the New York Times. Bennet, though, was long gone by the time the destruction was evident. Within a year of the original deal, he was on his way to getting handsomely repaid for his work, with the financial industry that his scheme enriched conveniently serving as one of his top U.S. Senate campaign contributors.

The school budget crisis this scheme exacerbated has empowered billionaires’ foundations to leverage their wealth in the name of corporatist ideology. With Denver schools especially strapped for cash in the wake of Bennet’s scheme, the Waltons, the Gateses and others have in the Denver Public School system a perfect target. The schools’ budget crisis makes local schools particularly willing to trade education policymaking – say, tearing up a school’s union contract – for the much-needed operating cash that foundations provide. Under the rule of this oligarchy, Denver has for years now been on a pro-charter-school, anti-union tear. Despite data showing that such ideology has often produced terrible academic results in Denver, the corporate “reforms” have nonetheless been loyally backed by the city’s corruption-plagued school board. Even by modern standards, that oligarchy-serving corruption is breathtaking, as Denver school board members moonlight in jobs that give them personal financial interests in anti-public-school “reforms.” As I recently reported:

(The school board’s) current president is paid by a private education foundation whose stated goal is to put more public money into privately run charter schools. It’s immediate past president resigned to go work for a private education foundation that does business with the school district. Another of its board members runs a foundation that gets money from the school district. A previous board member went from the board to a run a group looking to bring more corporate influence into the school system. And now another leading candidate for a board vacancy, the pro-voucher former lieutenant governor Barbara O’Brien, says that even if she wins the board seat, she will ignore concerns about self-dealing and remain the paid executive director of a pro-charter foundation to which the school board gives public money.

All of this has created a political climate where corruption and conflicts of interest are just right out in the open. In this local oligarchy, nobody even tries to hide what’s really going on. There simply is no shame anymore – nor is there any pretense surrounding what education politics is now really all about. To see that in action, consider this year’s school board candidate Michael Johnson.

Like O’Brien and the other slate of anti-public-school candidates, Johnson is campaigning on a promise to take more money out of the public school system and put it into privately run charter schools. But what distinguishes him is his role making huge money off the public school system for his private law firm, Kutak Rock. He did this as one of the key participating private attorneys in the aforementioned Wall Street financing scheme that pulverized the school system’s budget.

According to financial documents obtained by Salon that Bennet allies in the school system have until now kept secret, Denver taxpayers have been forced to cough up more than $3.6 million million to Johnson’s private law firm for bond work in the last decade. One fifth of that sum was generated since just 2008 – specifically for the budget-busting refinancing deal that made Wall Street so much cash. Johnson was one of the Kutak Rock attorneys who worked on that deal. Yes, that’s right – a key player at the law firm that made so much money off the infamous refinancing deal and that has made millions off school board business is running for a decision-making position on the school board.

The potential for self-dealing and conflicts of interest should be obvious if Johnson is elected to a school board that has done so much business with his law firm (no doubt, this is why Kutak Rock employees are scattered throughout his campaign reports – though thanks to Colorado’s pathetic campaign finance disclosure laws, we won’t know if there was more such money financing the outside groups supporting him).

Incredibly, to help him navigate the legal questions surrounding those potential conflicts of interest, Johnson’s campaign was by his own admission provided legal counsel at taxpayer expense by the Denver school administration. This is grotesque, but not all that surprising. After all, this is the same administration that has been a champion of Johnson’s pro-charter-school platform. It is also the same administration that is so cavalier with taxpayer cash that it is now diverting a huge chunk of resources out of Denver classrooms and into the renovation of a lavish new downtown headquarters for school administration officials.

In a minimally functioning democracy, these facts would doom a candidate in a local school board election. But this isn’t a functioning democracy – this is an oligarchy. And so these facts have been drowned out by the anti-public-school slate’s huge money advantage – an advantage which allows these “reform” candidates to overwhelm voters with mail and paid canvassing, all while the underfunded opposition doesn’t have matching resources to get inconvenient facts out.

That money advantage, of course, comes from – you guessed it! – the oligarchs. For instance, as Westword reports, Johnson and O’Brien have cashed huge checks from right-wing billionaire Phil Anschutz, who is famous in Colorado for funding anti-gay ballot initiatives and sponsoring conservative Christian political groups like Colorado for Family Values.

They have also cashed similarly large checks from oilman and former Colorado Republican Party chairman Bruce Benson. And they have received huge donations from Kent Thiry and/or Thiry’s wife. Thiry is the CEO of a scandal-plagued health care conglomerate that has made a name for itself as a target of federal criminal and civil investigations.

Thanks to this, the oligarchy-backed slate in this one city is now awash in an unprecedented amount of money that allows the slate to grossly outspend the pro-public education forces. According to the latest campaign finance reports, the slate of four anti-public-school candidates in Denver has collectively raked in almost $600,000. That figure doesn’t even counting the hundreds of thousands of dollars more in “independent expenditures” almost certainly being spent on their behalf by out-of-state education “reform” groups. One of those we already know about is called “Great Schools Denver”. Its name implies it is a local group, but its $200,000+ slush fund is provided by just 9 Education Oligarchs, the majority of whom aren’t from Denver. Indeed, a third of its money is provided by Bloomberg, and another third is provided by an arm of a D.C.-based front group sponsored by Wall Streeters.

One reaction to all this is to be thankful that we here in Colorado at least still have elections for school boards. After all, in more and more locales, the oligarchs have used their money to buy an end to such elections and vest all school decisions with the mayor. That makes schools easier for those oligarchs to control, because they only have to buy and sell one big political office rather than many small ones that still face some semblance of grassroots accountability.

But while we can be thankful that the patina of democracy still exists here, it is just that: a patina. With the amount of cash oligarchs are pouring into the education politics of this state and with the revolving door spinning so fast between school boards and the corporate oligarchy those boards do business, the elections often turn out to be predetermined affairs. One side has all the cash and thus overwhelms – and confuses – voters with reams of glossy mailers. The other side has earnest folk who knock on thousands of doors – but can rarely break through the noise.

That, of course, is by design. Democracy becomes oligarchy when enough cash is marshaled to effectively cut off a debate. This is especially true in the increasing number of places like Colorado where an ideological Citizen Kane-like monopolist makes sure there’s as little objective coverage of education as possible.

The only hope is that enough voters become aware of what’s going on – and actually do something about it. But that first requires a general awakening – which is exactly what the oligarchs are trying most desperately to prevent.

I didn't read it. I've just never quoted that much bull$hit with one post

Politics has never been about telling the truth, it's about convincing others to believe your story.